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Inside Ron Paul's Counter-Convention

Last week, thousands of people descended upon Minneapolis—the other Twin City—for Ron Paul's Rally for the Republic, a colorful affair heavy on Revolutionary War symbolism. The gathering was meant to serve as a message of revolt to the Republican Party from some of its most disaffected constituents. Just a little more than a cannon's range away from the Xcel Center in St. Paul, where the official R.N.C was taking place, Paul's rally attracted pilgrims from all over the country—some driving from as far as New York and Alabama, some even walking from Wisconsin, 200 miles away—and ended up having all the energy that the R.N.C. lacked in its halting start. The atmosphere was certainly more informal and the attendees more outré. Compared to the general electorate, Ron Paul believers tend to be disproportionately white and male, but they're also younger and grungier. There's a misfit quality to many of them, and a disagreeable odor to some. Ponytails, mullets, goatees, dreadlocks, and piercings were everywhere. But families also made the trip, a few wearing tricorne hats and other colonial clothing.

The culmination of the rally took place on Tuesday at the Target Center, where a procession of libertarian- and conservative-leaning speakers, including Grover Norquist, Tucker Carlson, and Jesse Ventura, condemned the state of the Republican establishment. ("Socialist" Democrats also took a lashing, though their evilness was so obvious as to warrant less mention.) They also praised Paul's proposals to abolish the Fed, reinstate the gold standard, and immediately withdraw nearly all U.S. troops from abroad. By the time Barry Goldwater Jr. made the grand introduction, 12,000 people had gathered in the arena, and when Paul took the stage he electrified them with a call to action and a hard-hitting denunciation of the Patriot Act, the War on Drugs, national I.D. cards, and executive abuses. Paul is an underrated speaker capable of preacher-like animation, and he was particularly fired up on this night. No fewer than three times did stomping chants of "END THE FED!" break out.Paul is no longer running for president. In fact, when I ask the 73-year-old Texas congressman if he'll ever run for the White House again, he answers, "Oh, I doubt that very much," then adds, "If I was anxious to do that then I would have continued the process, as an independent person or something, because we had a fair amount of momentum." So what was the point of his convention?

The Rally for the Republic was announced back in June, as a way for Paul to make a loud and clear statement to his party as it tried to suppress his and his supporters' views. Paul's campaign said he was not invited to speak at the R.N.C., despite getting 1.2 million votes in the Republican primaries. (Fred Thompson, by comparison, received 286,000 votes and a prime time Tuesday slot.) His followers found themselves cheated at several state conventions when their fellow Republicans bent or broke rules in order to exclude them from the national convention. Clearly, top Republicans had decided that party unity called for keeping troublemakers out of the big tent.

As a result, the G.O.P. may have further incited the Ron Paul revolution. Shortly after the rally was announced, Paul also launched a grass-roots action group called Campaign for Liberty, dedicated to furthering the goals of "individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a noninterventionist foreign policy." The organization, a 501(c)(4), represents an attempt by Paul to convert the lightning he captured in the primary and convert it into a lasting movement. It will focus on educating and recruiting new leaders at all levels of government, from local precincts on up.

Some 700 activists attended the Campaign for Liberty grass-roots training session on August 31. One trainee told me that three fourths of the people in attendance were either running for office or planning to run for office. It's this level of intense engagement that was perhaps the most striking part of the Rally for the Republic. A goodly number of the Paul supporters I encountered at the concert on Monday night and the blowout on Tuesday told me with calm conviction—or slightly unsettling zeal—that it was just a matter of time until they sought office, if they weren't running for Congress or state assembly already. And if most didn't have the intellectual capacity of Bill Clinton or the charisma of Ronald Reagan, a few had genuine potential, and most, upon cursory inspection at least, seemed generally free of the conspiracy thinking and fringe lunacy that stalk the edges of Paul's events.

B.J. Lawson may be the most promising example. Thirty-two years old, with the all-American good looks and dimpled chin of a more boyish Aaron Eckhardt, Lawson is a self-identified "Ron Paul Republican" running for Congress in North Carolina's fourth district. He studied engineering at Duke and then received an M.D. before leaving a residency in neurosurgery, also at Duke, to start a company that specializes in delivering clinical information to doctors' wireless devices. His experience as an entrepreneur, he says, led him to start asking questions about our healthcare system, national debt, and other thorny issues.

Lawson faces an uphill battle against 20-year Democratic incumbent David Price but claims his campaign's internal polling gives him reason to be optimistic. (No public polls are available yet.) He has already overcome a challenge by the G.O.P. in his primary. "Honestly, the party establishment worked really hard to get me not to run," he tells me after Monday night's outdoor concert and speech by Paul, whom he introduced. "They actually put up a guy to run against me. A lot of folks thought I was going to get toasted." Pulling out a copy of the Constitution from his coat pocket (he carries one around with him at all times), he says, "We gave away about 10,000 of these things, we had lots of grass-roots support, and we walked away with 71 percent of the [primary] vote." Lawson doesn't call for scrapping the Fed, as Paul does, but he does want to eliminate the income tax, and he shares Paul's opposition to pre-emptive war and nation building. He cites Paul as "definitely my inspiration," explaining, "I'd almost given up hope" before the congressman's presidential bid.

Almost all the Paul activists seeking office for the first time told me they will run again if they come up short this time around. Paul's supporters have both a sense of urgency and the patience to wait until 2012 or beyond to start seeing the fruits of their labor. Many compare their mission to the Goldwater movement, which took years to produce results but eventually left a deep mark on the Republican Party.

Carl Bunce, an affable, talkative 31-year-old Republican with a Kentucky drawl now running for Congress in Nevada's third district, has also been inspired by Paul's example. "If it weren't for Ron Paul," he says, "I'd be sitting on my couch, playing PlayStation or Xbox with my little brother." Nevada's congressional primaries have not yet taken place, and as a newcomer Bunce, who resembles a less obnoxious version of Spencer Pratt, is a distant long shot against Republican incumbent Jon Porter. But he is fearless in criticizing the establishment frontrunner. To him, the Republican Party has become a "country club" of "neocon warmongers," and he takes personal offense at the fact that, as he tells it, elder party figures counseled him to save his money instead of wasting it on a quixotic bid for Congress.

Paul has suffered from a similar lack of respect, even after pulling in more than $6 million in contributions in one day, raising more money from U.S. soldiers and veterans than all the other Republican candidates combined, and drawing as much as 15 percent of the vote away from John McCain in late primaries. Paul owes his very stardom to a defining moment of disrespect during the South Carolina Republican debate in May 2007, when Rudy Giuliani bullied him for suggesting that U.S. foreign policy might have in part motivated 9/11. The anti-war candidate stood his ground with a provocative response about America's meddling in the Middle East and about "blowback"—the notion that actions we take abroad have unintended consequences that may harm us down the road—and gained a huge following overnight.

The Republican pollster and strategist Frank Luntz once compared Paul's followers to crabgrass, and that's just one example of the disdain in which they are held by the powers that be in the G.O.P. But is that changing? Paul says that he has been contacted by numerous Republican Congressmen in tight races seeking his endorsement. And The Washington Times reported that the McCain campaign actually negotiated with Paul through the R.N.C. about giving him a speaking slot in exchange for his support and the names of his voter database. (Paul suggests he may make a presidential endorsement later this month and seems to be leaning toward Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party or Libertarian Bob Barr.) Appearing on The Colbert Report on September 4, Paul said he could have spoken at the convention if he'd simply given up everything he believed in. (Colbert's reply: "So, just like everybody else…. Listen, you want to play with the big boys, you've got to play along.") The McCain campaign would not elaborate on the negotiations when asked by Vanity Fair about them.

As voters grow increasingly tired of the Republican Party's politics and priorities, its foreign policy, and its handling of the economy, it will have to evolve somehow to regain its footing. Several theories on how this can be accomplished are already being debated among conservatives. Should the G.O.P. start listening to Ron Paul? Reihan Salam, an associate editor at The Atlantic, and co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, believes the coalition Paul put together may be too flaky and heterogeneous—and, frankly, not Republican enough—to ever be taken seriously by the party. "A lot of that movement has to do with Goldwater rights, libertarian conservatism, a lot of it is Rainbow Coalition, and maybe half of it comes from the far left," says Salam. "It was a very unusual, quirky collection of lots of people who kind of reject the mainstream of American politics. I think the relationship to the mainstream of Republican politics is not really there."

To Ron Paul's supporters, that might make Salam yet another skeptic to disprove. At least these things are certain: The G.O.P. is vulnerable right now. And the opening salvos of "phase two" of the revolution, as Paul's followers call it, have been sounded. In the coming election cycles, we'll see how his armies fare with him still carrying the banner but no longer leading the charge.